Tag Archives: horror writing

Someone once said, “I write in order to discover what I think.” Could’ve been Blaise Pascal, or Joan Didion. Maybe Susan Sontag. I can’t remember.

The quote is accurate enough, I guess. A bit intellectual for me, though. Because I am naturally suspicious of what I think. Too many filters and prejudices attach to thinking, like those suckerfish on sharks.

I’m more comfortable with the statement, “I write in order to understand what I feel.” That’s seems a little closer to the mark.

I could dial in the focus even further and say, “I write in order to know what frightens me.” Now that seems true. And maybe that’s why most of what I write (and read) is identified as “horror”. After all, horror fiction is most concerned with the evocation of dread, right?

I think, therefore I ape….

That sub-head above caused me no end of anxiety. I mean, who the hell am I to tell any writer how – or how not– to approach a story? It’s ludicrous. But, as a READER, I know in my guts if a writer was just plowing the same old horror field, or if that writer was really down there in that basement with some un-named…thing. Or trapped in ‘The Penal Colony’ with Kafka’s protagonist.

As a writer, thinking too much tends to make me wily. I’m looking for an audience, or a cheap reaction. And the stories that spring from that soil usually never make it off my hard drive. But when I’m fueling the action of a story with my own revulsion and fear? Well, then I think I’m onto something true and good and worthwhile.

Since you’re reading this, I assume you are, to some extent, a horror fan (or a much-appreciated supportive friend who checks in on this blog every now and then) and, like me, completely unfazed by werewolves and vampires. Those old world tropes just don’t cut it anymore. Oh, they can be written as sexy and angst-ridden to appeal to a YA audience. But scary? Pazuzu-scary? No way.

And that New World, post-industrial trope – the Zombie – has been so done to death in fiction and movies, it’s become a parody of itself: undying, yet devoid of life.

I’m not saying a story written to these tropes cannot be effective. I’m saying any contemporary story using these tropes, will find success only insofar as it touches on more timeless, even phobic, fears.

Like claustrophobia, for example. One of my…problems.

If a writer wants to crank up the tension in a story, the easiest way to do it is by progressively limiting the mobility and the choices of the characters. Melville did it in Moby Dick. The moment the Pequod left the dock, those sailors were doomed, with no escape but a watery death. Where, in the trackless wastes of the Pacific, could they run to escape Ahab’s obsession?

Stephen King made immobility and the lack of options famously explicit in Misery. The protagonist is successively and progressively immobilized by accidental injury, involuntary drugging at the hands of a crazed fan. He is even hobbled, for Chrissakes (just to drive the immobility point home, in a spectacularly gruesome scene). And not only that, this all takes place in a remote cabin where no one will come to help. Talk about dwindling choices! And King’s own anxiety in relation to this situation is apparent in the writing.

Exorcising demons

I believe all writers – not just horror writers – use their fears to create their greatest stories: fear of intimacy, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of people not just like them. It’s almost as if the act of writing itself were nothing but the exorcising of these fears.

And maybe that’s just what it is.

My strongest stories are those composed of scenes that make me flinch. The ones that make me feel I am, myself, this character undergoing this horrifying experience. I may even turn my head away from the page as I type – but my fingers know the words, and won’t stop until the story is told.

To write a story and not be moved by it is a cheat – to both the writer and the reader.

And if you write enough stories, you start to see patterns. You see recurring themes and images.

In my own writing, I’ve noted a recurring theme of “children in peril”. And it freaks me out.

Now, I really have no idea where this comes from, but it definitely finds its way into a lot of my stories. A lot of them.

I wasn’t an abused kid. My family was loving and somewhat normal.

But there was this one experience, back in, oh, I’d say 1972 or thereabouts…

A Salem Story

I want to tell you a story about Salem, Massachusetts – my hometown.

The Salem Theater on Essex Street would let anyone in with 50 cents to see the Saturday afternoon matinee double feature. Yes, they were usually horror movies.

I was a regular. I was big for my age. And many times the ticket taker would conveniently look the other way, tear my ticket in half and wave me through.

My parents thought I was safe at the library or at a friend’s house. But I was at the Salem Theater watching “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death” or “The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant” or “Dracula A.D. 1972” or (moment of silence, please) “Attack of the Mushroom People”.

Those days the world was all Watergate and Vietnam. Horrors that beset adults.

Being eleven years old, the thing that made me want to shit my pants was the thought of the giant ants from “Them!” clacking their way down Lafayette street cutting people I knew in half in their enormous pincers. Such were the times.

That was all about to change.

One Saturday in late fall, I’d gone to the movies with a friend to see “Night of the Living Dead”. I was so horrified by the sight of things that used to be people fighting over intestines, gnawing on ulnas and generally cannibalizing every living human that got in their way. My lifelong fascination with zombies, in print and on the big screen, dates back to this day.

But that’s not what I want to tell you about.

Fully satisfied with the afternoon’s horror renderings, my friend and I left the theater in near dark. I remember the light bulbs around the edge of the marquis were twinkling. The YMCA across the street seemed closed. No lights.

We walked down Crombie Street, heading for Riley Plaza and the train tracks.

Back in 1972, the Salem stop for the commuter trains from Boston (the “Budliners) was under Riley Plaza.

I was a little late and needed to hurry and get home. So I decided to go down through the train station and walk down the tracks that ran parallel to Canal Street.

My friend and I parted ways at the stairs leading down to the station.

“Good movie, huh?” he said.

“Yeah. The part where they pulled that guy’s intestines out was wicked cool,” I said, I think with a little too much bravado.

“Well, see you at school,” he said and headed off up Washington Street.

Me. I looked down the stairs leading to the train platform. It was too dark for me to see the bottom. A wind heavy with diesel fumes and a chemical smell from the leather factory blew up into my face.

Suddenly, heading down into the dark, alone, didn’t seem like the best plan. But, inexplicably, I took the first few steps down toward whatever awaited me down there in the gloom.

Looking back on this, forty years later, I’m amazed that I still recall so many seemingly insignificant details: the increasing smell of urine as I descended; the feeling of leaving everything safe and OK as the sound of Riley Plaza traffic receded behind and above me; the one piece of Bazooka Bubblegum I held tightly in my left front pants pocket, like some talisman to keep me safe.

I got to the bottom of the stairs and stepped down onto the platform. The traffic above was muffled to the point where I felt impossibly isolated, like I’d entered another reality. One that existed next to, or even within, my own world.

The darkness around me was complete. I raised my eyebrows to open them as much as I possibly could. There was a vague bluish-purple zone way up in front of me that I assumed was the end of the tunnel. And freedom from the terror that was now rising past my sternum and lodging itself directly at the base of my throat.

That’s when I heard it.

A rustling just behind me. Something down low, near the ground. I froze.

My heart was aching, it was pounding so hard. I couldn’t see anything.

Then something grabbed the bottom of my left pant leg.

And tugged at it.

I was so horrified at what was happening to me, I’d failed to register that the Budliner was nearing the entrance to the tunnel. It’s bright, Cyclops light progressively filling the tunnel with a cone of light.

When the train’s light was nearly upon me, I somehow summoned the courage to turn around and see what was tugging at my leg.

I jerked my around quickly, like snatching a Band Aid off a scab. And then I screamed.

A fourth lay on the ground with a fistful of my pant leg in his hand. The scene all the more horrifying because of the train’s garishly bright light.

I knew then that zombies were real and I was going to be eaten. I would watch as they ripped open my belly and removed my intestines.

Without thinking, I kicked my leg free and ran screaming down the platform. And I didn’t stop running until the cramp in my side felt like a hot poker being twisted in my guts. I ran a mile, nearly to the A&P on Canal Street.

I never told anyone about it. I’d calmed down enough by the time I got home. The familiar surroundings and the smell of dinner brought me back to this world. The world I knew.

But ever since that day, I knew there was a world of horror that could rear up right out of the ordinary everyday world. A horror you never suspected was there.

Of course, looking back as a fifty-year-old man, I know that the zombies in the train station were just some homeless guys. Probably drunks, who knows?

So, is that why I like to write horror stories? Is that why “kids in peril” show up in my fiction? I don’t know.

I find it’s best not to look too closely at that stuff.

The writing is the thing.

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I’m currently writing a collection of short stories (horror stories, of course) all based in Salem. I think this experience of mine will end up in one of them. I’m planning on putting in some personal essays on fiction, horror, and writing as we go along. But I’ll still publish stories here, just want to mix things up a little. Hope some of my Salem readers recognized some of the landmarks in the piece above. Thanks everyone for continuing to show up to read some of my scribblings!